PERSPECTIVES: "Enemy of the people" (03/02/03)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

"Enemy of the people"

Danylo Shumuk, now nearly 90 years old, was 19 when he was first arrested and imprisoned in 1934. Eventually, he became the longest-serving prisoner of conscience in the former Soviet Union, spending 42 years in prison or exile. I met him for dinner in Cleveland in 1988, soon after his ultimate release. He told stories and rendered opinions in a straightforward, unsentimental way. Mr. Shumuk is one steely individual.

Having listened to several accounts of how resolute principle confronted cruelty in the prisons and the camps, our host asked Mr. Shumuk if there was any one moment that was worse than all the others.

That's easy, Mr. Shumuk said. It was in the Norilsk labor camp north of the Arctic Circle in 1945. In the early morning darkness of the Siberian winter, he and his newly arrived fellows were mustered to watch as the guards dragged two bodies from the disciplinary cell, deposited them in front of the assembled prisoners and sank their bayonets into the half-frozen corpses.

"Smotritie (watch well)!" the commandant shouted at the inmates, who ached from weariness and cold. "This is the only way you'll ever get out of this place" That, Mr. Shumuk said, was the low point of his life. Understood...

Memories of that conversation come back to me as March 5 - the 50th anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death - approaches. It was Stalin, really, who perfected the political system that Lenin invented, although actually Lenin got the idea from observing how a narrow class of aristocrats numbering no more than a quarter million controlled the Russian Empire with its 125 million peasants and workers. A disciplined corps of Communist Party members could do the same, he reasoned.

Lenin's Bolsheviks styled themselves as the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and promised "the people" a future of brotherhood and bounty, but first, they said, they had to eliminate all opposition - so-called "enemies of the people," otherwise known as "vermin." There were millions of them. To deal with those, Lenin created a secret police force to identify and arrest them. He called it the "All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage" - Cheka for short. The Cheka build lots of prisons and labor camps to accommodate all the "enemies" - except, obviously, those who were executed or died under torture.

Once the "enemies" were eliminated, the state could move forward to the "perfect society," where poverty and inequality would be banished. So was God, by the way. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" took His place, using force to shape the future according to their utopian vision.

In the mid-1920s Joseph Stalin assumed control of this diabolical system. He had started his career in the Caucasus, organizing bank robberies and strikes. Lenin, who called him that "wonderful Georgian," was so impressed with Stalin's understanding of the hundred or more peoples of the Soviet Union, that he made him Commissar for the Affairs of Nationalities. Then, while others grappled for power within the walls of the Kremlin, Stalin used his office to develop a broad network of activists loyal to him. This proved decisive after Lenin's death.

Once he became dictator, Stalin saw "enemies of the people" everywhere he looked. Some, like his rival, Leon Trotsky, or the Ukrainian nationalist, Yevhen Konovalets, were assassinated. Vast populations, like the "kulaks" in Ukraine, he dealt with on a macro-political scale. They were to be "liquidated as a class" - Stalin's euphemism for genocide. Millions of farmers were starved to death; millions more arrested and sent to Siberia, along with purged party members, military officers, nationalists of all stripes, suspected saboteurs, dissident intellectuals, ordinary criminals and many who were swept up just to meet arrest quotas.

The enormous labor camp population suited Stalin's larger purposes. The party had promised "the people" a future of prosperity and happiness. Failure to achieve that was blamed on the "enemies of the people" who were then put to work building Siberia's infrastructure, where much of the country's lumber, coal, copper, gold and other minerals were located. Stalin's slaves dug the White Sea, Baltic and the Moscow-Volga canals, laid railroad track, constructed strategic roads, factories and hydroelectric stations. Mr. Shumuk was in Norilsk to work in the mines, which were supplying the Soviet arms industry with nickel, molybdenum and chrome.

Life outside the camps was better only by degree. Soviet citizens suffered from crowded living quarters, a shortage of consumer goods, oppressive and dangerous labor conditions, and no freedom whatsoever. Social discourse, artistic expression, everything was monitored by the state. Even children were taught to inform on their parents. The Cheka morphed into the GPU, then the NKVD and finally the KGB, but it was always the same organization, existing to terrorize and control.

To complete the monstrous system, Stalin encouraged people to worship him:

Today and forever, oh, Stalin, be praised

For the light that the planets and fields emit.

Thou art the heart of the people, the truth and the faith.

We're thankful to Thee for the sun Thou hast lit!

A collective of 13 writers composed, "To the Great Stalin from the Ukrainian People," in 1944. It was delivered over the signatures of 9 million people.

Mr. Shumuk didn't sign it, I'll tell you that. When Stalin died in 1953, Shumuk was one of the leaders of prison uprisings in Norilsk. Outbreaks like those throughout the gulag led to a wide-ranging release of prisoners; except for those who remained defiant and, therefore, free - barbed wire notwithstanding. Danylo Shumuk, was among those.

On March 5, I intend to say a prayer for Stalin's victims: for those like Shumuk who survived and those like my Uncle Slavko who died - no one knows where or when exactly. For all we know, he might have been one of the unfortunate victims who froze to death so the Norilsk commandant could make an impression on that morning in 1945. Slavko Fedynsky, my father's brother, was studying for the priesthood. That made him an "enemy of the people," but it's a title he didnít deserve. Instead, let's give it to those who actually earned it: Lenin, Stalin and all their Politburo comrades.

Joseph Stalin has been dead for 50 years. The nations that once constituted the Soviet Union are still trying to overcome his legacy. May we never see his like again.

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